In this interactive exercise, students explore the normative and economic issues that arise from minimum wage increases.
This sit efeatures a different person or event in history each day. Past features include Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Banneker, Rosa Parks, Samuel Slater, Louisa May Alcott, Radio City Arts Hall, the Wright brothers' first flight, the Bill of Rights, the Gadsden Purchase, the Federal Reserve System, the Wounded Knee massacre, Pearl Harbor, the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction, and more.
Students participate in a JiTT activity to read the front pages of two target language newspapers and to report the content to their classmates in the target language. When this exercise is done on a regular basis, it can result in increasing vocabulary and speech fluency.
Students reenact a public hearing to determine how to manage a deer herd that is overpopulated.
This OLogy activity offers kids a fun way to get firsthand knowledge of how archaeologists find lost sites. In Tools of the Trade, kids are given six cartoon frames, each illustrating a problem the archaeology team faced in locating a lost mission on St. Catherines Island. When kids select a frame, they are given details about the problem; they are then asked to pick which tool they think helped the team solve the problem. Each time they correctly identify a tool, they are given additional details of the story and the cartoon frame is "colored in." After correctly identifying the tools for all six cartoon frames, they have the option of printing a PDF of the full-color cartoon.
In this activity, students create two- and three-dimensional maps by using a data grid of an imaginary section of Earth's surface. They are challenged to create six different maps of various surface features and answer questions about them.
Ranks all 50 states in total energy production. Includes links to tables which rank production of crude oil, natural gas, coal, and electricity; crude oil emissions; total energy consumption; and energy prices.
This ILD helps students to understand the relationship between total revenue and price elasticity of demand.
In 1862, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill, which granted public land and funds to build a transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific Railroad would lay tracks from California heading east, and the Union Pacific Railroad would lay tracks from the Missouri River west. The photograph taken in Placer County, "Grading the Central Pacific Railroad," shows some of the construction. Work on the railroad was physically difficult and at times dangerous, and attracting workers was a challenge. The majority of the Central Pacific's laborers were Chinese. A Chinese worker is shown in the image "Heading (top cut) of East Portal, Tunnel No. 8." Both railroad companies actively recruited Chinese laborers because they were regarded as hard workers and were willing to accept a lower wage than white workers, mostly Irish immigrants. As construction progressed, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific competed to see which could lay the most track each day. A photograph of a sign near Promontory Park, Utah, commemorates the day that Central Pacific crews laid an unprecedented 10 miles of track. The meeting of the two sets of tracks ? the "gold spike" ceremony ? took place on May 10, 1869. Several photographs and drawings depict this historic moment. Now the country was connected as never before: a journey between San Francisco and New York that previously took up to six months now took only days. The photograph "High Bridge in Loop," from Views from a Trip to California, shows a train passing quickly through a mountain pass. The transcontinental railroad allowed people to travel more, farther, and in pleasant conditions, as reflected in the photograph "Commissary Car, 'Elkhorn Club.'" The photograph "Knights of Pythias at the Santa Fe Railway Station, Anaheim" shows an example of the popularity of trains. Even as the transcontinental railroad brought the new country together, it brought change to the world of Native Americans. The tracks ran through a number of tribal territories, bringing into conflict cultures that held very different views of the land and how it might be used and lived on. The painting The First Train, by Herbert Schuyler, depicts three Indians pointing past their encampment at a train in the far distance. The railroad also brought an increasing number of European Americans west. One consequence of this influx was the depletion of the buffalo herds, a major food source for Plains Indians. European Americans would often shoot buffalo for sport from the train; by 1880, the buffalo were mostly gone and Plains Indians had been gathered onto reservations. Millions of acres of open grassland were being settled by the people moving west. Eventually, much of this land became the farmland that fed a growing nation. The transcontinental railroad opened up the West to the rest of the country, even if they never made the trip themselves. A Currier & Ives hand-colored lithograph depicts a train running along the Truckee River in Northern California. The San Francisco publishing firm of Lawrence & Houseworth hired photographers and published photographic tourist catalogs containing views of the West, which they sold commercially. The railroad took hold in popular culture, as shown by sheet music for the song "New Express Galop [sic]." There was even a railroad board game illustrating "Railroads Between New York and San Francisco, California, with Scenes on the Way."
John Noble Wilford, a New York Times science writer, outlines various hypotheses on the origin of bipedalism.
In this problem-based learning activity, students will examine opposing views on the Amazon Rainforest and will take a position on land-use and species conservation in one of the last areas of biodiversity on Earth. This activity is part of Exploring the Environment.
This issue of the free online magazine, Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears, explores the tundra and how it can illustrate ecological concepts, relationships, and changes.
This article describes robots that are helping scientists explore the Gakkel Ridge deep below the Arctic Ocean and links to informational text about them. Versions are available for students in grades K-1, 2-3 and 4-5. Related science and literacy activities are included.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sponsors a collection of online resources for training in environmental topics. These resources are organized by topic (agriculture, energy, human health, and others) and are searchable by keyword. Each resource is accompanied by a brief metadata description and is provided in a choice of formats: downloadable (PDF), XML, or a bookmark.
Spreadsheets across the Curriculum module. Students build Excel spreadsheets to calculate monthly mortgage payments and evaluate how much of their payment is applied to the principle and interest.
Students volunteer at any one of a variety of community agencies that serve low-income populations to better understand the underlying issues of poverty and income distribution in their community.
This video from Kentucky's Last Great Places shows how the Green River has remained unusually clean and why it is home to several endangered aquatic species.
Suggestions are made on how to use the resources featured in the issue of Beyond Weather and the Water Cyle in a unit on the greenhouse effect. Hands-on experiences and nonfiction text are provided to help students answer the question "How is Earth like a greenhouse?" Suggestions are also made for formative and summative assessments.
Unit plans for Grades K-2 and 3-5 are a regular feature of the magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle. The plans draw on articles and resources in a themed issue and are aligned with national science and language arts standards. This unit is designed to provide elementary students with the opportunity to investigate how the annual rings in trees help scientists learn about past climates. It uses hands-on experiences and nonfiction text to answer the unit question: How do trees help scientists learn about the past?
In this lab exercise, students of intermediate-level French will watch a short video on brain plasticity from the universcience VOD collection online.